This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art, which may be related to various aspects of the present disclosure that are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present disclosure. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
In the field of human-machine interfaces (HMI), systems which are based upon gesture recognition and/or voice recognition process recently demonstrate some nice use cases in video game applications with home consoles and navigation services on smart phones respectively. For instance, the new Microsoft console XBOX One will never be fully switched off, waiting for activation through a simple vocal switch-on command (by “Xbox on” sentence).
Following the mentioned trend, people can easily imagine that in a near future many devices at a same location (home, public transport, and so on) can accept commands from speech or gestures through audio or imaging sensors. At home for instance, it may become a usual case to have more than one product of the same type and with such capabilities to operate in close vicinity. Taking again the XBOX One as an example, it is a possible option to have two similar consoles in a close area.
In case of a usual audio/video interactivity sequence between a user in a room and one of its devices (in a same room for instance), the following functions or scenario may be needed or considered:
(1) The user wants to interact by voice or gesture with one of its close devices;
(2) The user executes the command (speech or gesture) to an expected device, which is supposed to initiate the interaction (for example, a set-up menu call of device, a media selection, and so on); and
(3) A triggering command from the user may initiate interaction with more than one device without disambiguating operation, leading to a conflict and non desirable situation (for example, two close XBOX One may switch on by capturing the same speech command).
The triggering event for an interaction, that is the detection of a specific gesture or a specific voice command, may be executed not intentionally and out of the device's using context. But it should not lead to the real initialization of such interactivity session if unwanted. Some double-check procedure is expected here.
In brief, in human-machine interaction based on gesture recognition and/or voice recognition, sometimes there are several devices to be controlled in a limited area. An ambiguity problem exists since there might be difficult to determine which device is to be controlled (several devices might respond to the command at the same time).
Therefore, there is a need for a disambiguation system to allow speech/gesture controlled devices to operate in close vicinity, such as in a home place.
The above-described ambiguity problem due to vicinity was already aware of and discussed in the home entertainment system in the context of using wireless game paddles with one—or more—close console(s). Known solutions try to solve this problem by an initial (one shot) pairing process, which defines a binding between each paddle and a selected console through an interactive pairing process explicitly done by the final user (it is considered that PS3 and Wii consoles are using such approach). However these solutions are expected to be done not very often, which normally will request physical interaction of the user with the device(s) related to the pairing process and therefore finally cannot be easily extended in a daily speech/gesture multi-device control use. Moreover, in some cases a user may be apart from the device to be controlled with some distance, where a classic button-based interface cannot be applied for control.
Consequently, there remains a need to improve the disambiguation system of human-machine interface at least for systems which are based upon gesture recognition and/or voice recognition.